Mohsen Gallery
Tehran, Iran

Mohsen Gallery

For its inaugural participation in VOLTA Basel, Mohsen Gallery represents a first-hand account of the passion and enthusiasm of a generation of Iranians. Majid Biglari, Zahra Ghyasi, and Samira Hodaei represent a large, young generation struggling not only to deal with the difficult situation they are facing, but also to transform, manipulate, and modify it so as to achieve their personal and generational dreams and aspirations.

A consistent feature in Majid Biglari’s works is that he carefully hides a significant part of their visual semiotics, while he invites his audience to participate in the process of giving meaning and making sense of what they experience. In “Soot, Fog, Soil” installation, Biglari has concealed the clues in his work so as to close the gap between his unlived dream life and his complex, tumultuous lived experience.

Zahra Ghyasi, The Evening Confession, 2021, From Venus; where the Sun rises in the West and sets in the East Series, oil on canvas, 150 x 220 cm (59 x 86.6 in.) — Zahra Ghyasi, *The Evening Confession*, 2021, From *Venus; where the Sun rises in the West and sets in the East* Series, oil on canvas, 150 x 220 cm (59 x 86.6 in.)

Zahra Ghyasi has created a fantastical land to tolerate the present thorny reality. The hallucinatory architecture of her world is marked by fanciful frolicsomeness and erotic euphoria. She is seeking the impossible balance between realism and fantasy.

In the recent period of her career, Samira Hodaei has been focusing on examining the huge gap between the golden dream of oil and the reality of the corruption it brings. With an approach that is similar to that of Majid but with more flexible material, and similar to a therapist, she seeks to mend her relationship with what is really out there by revising her childhood aspirations and those of her generation.

Considered side by side, the works of Majid, Zahra, and Samira amount to the self-portrait of a generation who were conceived in the womb of dread and anxiety of war, and whose lives are shaped under the compulsions of giving up their desires, seeking to fulfil their dreams anywhere but their homeland; whether in a material heterotopia or a surreal, hypothetical world. It is a courageous confrontation with the overwhelming power of destruction using their only weapon: their minds. It is tantamount to stripping away their inwards to make manifest what is still the source of hope and passion for living and creating.